Finding Infinite Interest

The question being, “What is the capital of the Moon?”. To which one would assume to such a question there would be no answer. Which you would be correct to assume but while there was no be all and end all answer. It didn’t stop a litany of possibilities, proposals, points of interest, potentials, philosophies and prank answers appearing. Even on such a nonsensical question Google was able to find over 89 million results which were of interest and lead you on a long fascinating path of discovery to who knows what. Most unlikely being what is the capital of the Moon.

We live in an age of near infinite information, information that has never before been so accessible. While of course information is infinite in itself and a lot has been done to make it freely accessible. We find ourselves in a whole new age of accessibility. Libraries did a great job in literally opening up the doors to the wider public which the internet then neatly blew off the hinges. The dawn of the internet put nearly everything at our fingertips but as the internet has matured so has the distribution and consumption of information. It is no longer a case of simply finding what interests you and reading about it in a book it’s about sharing it, exploring it, making art of it. We no longer have to sit in front of reams of text on pulp pages or horribly designed visually awkward web pages. The sharing and distribution of information and knowledge has in itself become a vibrant source of entertainment. In which one can easily broaden their interests from their initial investigative niche in a matter of seconds. For instance I was listening to the most recent episode of ‘99% Invisible’, a podcast dedicated to the art of design, in which they discuss the creation of a fireproof, waterproof, lightweight and torpedo blast-proof chair for the Navy. Thusly the Emeco chair was born and before I knew it I was up to my eyeballs in open tabs on chair design, posture alignment, Naval design, torpedo proof materials, copyright legislation etc. To the point where the tabs were near unreadably small and it was all utterly fascinating. Thanks to a single podcast episode.

The expansion and proliferation of the likes of vlogging and blogging and podcasting. Of Youtube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Reddit and many others which put the creator at the heart of a topic are to thank. Individualists have been given the ability to talk about what they love or to gather a like-minded group around them and pontificate on a plethora of fascinations. It doesn’t matter how niche their interest there will always be surprisingly and equally unsurprisingly an audience for them. The likes of Roman Mars of 99% Invisible and Kristian Williams of KaptainKristian or Evan Puschak of the NerdWriter1 have turned some of the most mundane subject matters into some of the most interesting and heartfelt pieces of art. They’ve done so through stories, through human stories.

“Design is the lens through which we can tell the story of humanity. That’s what I am interested in. And in making the mundane world seem more wonderful some how.”

That’s the words of Roman Mars the creator and host of 99% Invisible. As he touches on we are born natural storytellers. We want to share and listen, we want to be apart of them, we love to discover. We’ve been passing information around for years in books, pamphlets, movies, poems, songs, plays, but it has never been so accessibly diverse nor so easily digestible.We have never had so many cooks in the kitchen, there is literally hundreds upon thousands upon hundreds of thousand of voices out there talking, sharing and putting their interests and fascinations on display. Right now there is literally an infinite amount out there at our fingertips vying to be watched, read, listened to and interacted with. And as long as we continue to be captivated by the world around us and our desire to share, to tell stories this is never going to change. We will never have trouble finding infinite amounts of things to interest us.